Types:

Most of the world’s settlements are rural and they are stable and permanent. They are of three types:

1. Compact Settlements:

A compact settlement is based on farming. These are mostly found in highly productive alluvial plains like Indo-Gangetic Plains, the Hwang Ho Valley, Valley o Nile. The houses are compact and congested with narrow plains.

The size of these settlements depends on nature and resources of surrounding country. They have a high degree of segregation and differentiation of the upper and lower castes. Compact settlements are also found in hunt­ing and fishing communities.

2. Semi-Compact Settlement:

Semi-Compact is a transitional phase in the growth of compact settle­ment. The emergence is because of the difference of semi-arid regions from humid regions and marginal productive land to that of fertile land.

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Increase in population cause villages to grow in number of houses. These houses occupy open spaces and lead to semi-compact settlement which ultimately acquires a nucleated settlement.

3. Dispersed Settlement:

These are generally found in hills, plateaus and grasslands. These are found in areas where it is essential that the farmer should live on his own land. Overpopulation is one of the rea­sons for dispersed settlement.

If a part of the popula­tion left a village to found a new one they often found dispersed rather than a new village. Dispersed settle­ments are relatively recent in age like Steppe grass­lands of Kazakhstan.

Patterns:

Pattern of settlement is defined as the relationship between one house or building to another. It can be identified by reading and observing a local scale map. The patterns of settlement deals with compact and semi-compact only, as dispersed has its own shape. The socio cultural factors like caste structure or a func­tional need of people has a close bearing on its shape and size.

The rural settlements are classified under following patterns: Rectangular, Linear, Circular, Semi-circu­lar, Star-like, Triangular, and Nebular Pattern. The settlements is linear in valleys and mountainous ar­eas, rectangular in fertile plains, circular near the lakes and ponds, triangular at cross roads and in excep­tional cases it resembles the nebular form and on river terraces it is star-type.